Wednesday, August 15, 2012

The Family Research Council, Hate & A Shooting

This morning, a fellow identified as Floyd Corkins entered the
Washington D.C. offices of the Family Research Council with a gun and a
lot of ill-intent. He fought with and wounded a security guard before being subdued. Early reports identify Corkins
as a volunteer at the D.C. Center for the LGBT Community and--fill in
the usual caveats about jumping the gun here--it seems likely his
actions were politically motivated, a terrorist strike against the
organization.

On its "about" page, the Family Research Council (FRC) describes itself
as "the leading voice for the family in our nation’s halls of power."
Sounds rather innocuous. Why would anyone want to strike at that?

"One of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to
abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles
as the 'prophets' of a new sexual order."

That's a quote from an FRC pamphlet from 1999. Its title: "Homosexual
Activists Work to Normalize Sex with Boys." And there's things like
this:

"Gaining access to children has been a long-term goal of the homosexual movement."

That's from 'Homosexual Behavior and Pedophilia," a screed authored by
Frank York (of Focus on the Family) and Robert Knight, FRC Director of
Cultural Studies, and published by the FRC in 1999. Current FRC
president Tony Perkins tells the same tale.[1] From 2010:

"While activists like to claim that pedophilia is a completely distinct
orientation from homosexuality, evidence shows a disproportionate
overlap between the two... It is a homosexual problem."

Knight, in his decade at FRC, wrote numerous anti-gay tracts for the
organization and employed, as source-material, the work of Paul Cameron
of the Family Research Institute. Cameron's "research" portrays homosexuals as subhuman disease-pits
who enjoy pedophilia, eating and wallowing in shit, putting gerbils up
their asses and who have hundreds and even thousands of sexual partners
per year and die at a young age. Such "research" led to Cameron's expulsion from the American
Psychological Association and his consistent misrepresentation of
scientific data has acquired for him a long list of condemnations from
various professional associations over the years. His work has absolutely no scientific validity but it has the one ingredient most important to the FRC.

To hear the FRC's Steven Schwalm tell it, gays stand opposed to everything good and decent in the world:

"Militant homosexuality is fundamentally opposed to religion, family,
and anything that presupposes a natural moral order, a transcendent God,
or something else higher than ourselves... They are totalitarians who
accuse everyone that disagrees with them of 'hatred'... They mock our
religious symbols, deride our beliefs, and even desecrate our churches
and sacraments."

Indeed, the FRC has even compared gays--even gay Christians--to
Satanists. In 1997, when President Clinton held an ecumenical breakfast
at the White House, merely inviting one gay minister among the 120
religious leaders taking part in it made then-FRC president Gary Bauer go ballistic:

"We are witnessing the Administration's moral meltdown. What's next? A memorial to Church of Satan founder Anton LeVay?"

The FRC has made it very clear that, in its view, American citizens who
are homosexuals are to be allowed absolutely no part in public life. In
1999, when Bill Clinton nominated James Hormel, a homosexual, to be U.S.
ambassador to Luxembourg, Schwalm was, of course, furiously opposed:

"This is about the basic issue of civilization. We think his agenda represents a clear and present danger to our country."

His "agenda," of course, being merely that he is gay. When, a few years
after Hormel, the new President, George Bush the junior, nominated a gay man to run the Office of National AIDS Policy,

"The Family Research Council's Richard Lessner called the nomination
'troubling and regrettable' and argues it is 'inconsistent with values
that the president maintains he stands for.'"

And so on. The FRC has consistently opposed any appointment of homosexuals to any government posts and, of course, has a decades-long record of advocacy for throwing homosexuals out of the military.

After the AIDS office appointment, then-FRC president Ken Connor offered
a look into the minds of those at the FRC when he sent to his minions
an ugly message
in which he trashes Bush as one whose actions "advance the homosexual
agenda." How, you may ask, did the uber-conservative Bush do this
terrible thing? In Connor's telling, he appointed three gay fellows to
minor government posts, once met with a gay Republican group, once
allowed a gay Republican congressman to speak at the Republican
convention and appointed, as ambassador to Canada, a fellow who says he
supports gay rights. As Connor, sees it, even just talking to
homosexuals or listening to them is an offense and merely suggesting
they shouldn't face legal persecution joins homosexuality itself as a
sufficiently serious offense that those who commit it are to be
blacklisted from government service.

Any place for gays in the private sector?

Businesses and organizations stand condemned by the FRC for anything
other than the sternest opposition to homosexuality. In June, when the
Republican National Committee hired a gay man to work on their finance
committee, it drew a furious objection
from the FRC. In the '90s, when American Airlines adopted a policy of
non-discrimination against homosexuals, then-FRC president Gary Bauer condemned
this as "open endorsement of sexual behavior that has been universally
discouraged because it is immoral, unhealthy and destructive to
individuals, families and societies." Target's support of a gay rights
group put the company in the FRC's crosshairs; the same thing happened with McDonald's.

Does the FRC think homosexuals have any place in life at all?

The org has, for years, pimped the line that homosexuals are mentally
deranged people who can be "cured" via "reparative therapy"--junk
"science" that is psychologically harmful to its victims and to which
the FRC clings despite the fact that it is soundly rejected by the professional scientific community. Like Cameron's "research" though, it has the one and only ingredient that matters to the FRC.[2]

The FRC also has a long record of advocacy for criminalizing
homosexuality. In 2003, a case went before the U.S. Supreme Court
challenging Texas' anti-sodomy law. A man had been arrested and
criminally sanctioned for having consensual sex with another man in the
privacy of his own home. Those at FRC filed a brief on behalf of
upholding the law, and were, of course, very publicly outraged when the
court struck it down. In 2010, the FRC's Sprigg appeared on
MSNBC's "Hardball" program and reaffirmed FRC support for criminalizing
homosexuality. Sprigg has also suggested homosexuals be deported, and refused entry into the United States.[3] In June, the FRC issued a prayer target list
that condemned the Obama administration for working to overturn
anti-gay laws abroad, some of which send gays to prison for years upon
conviction--the document asked FRC's followers to pray that their god
restrains the Obama administration from these activities.

When, in 1998, Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old student whose only "crime"
was being gay, was accosted, tortured and murdered by anti-gay thugs in
Laramie, Wyoming, it was suggested by those with some grasp of
rudimentary logic that perhaps the virulent anti-gay sentiment emanating
from elements of the far right may have helped create the atmosphere
and attitudes that led to this sort of thing. The FRC's Heather Farish was having none of that:

"Farish vehemently rejects such allegations. 'Don't blame AA because a drunk was beat up,' she said."

In the face of a sudden spate of teen suicides linked to anti-gay bullying, Perkins, in 2010, hacked out an article
in which he forthrightly rejected the notion that those who rail
against homosexuality--people like himself--have any responsibility for
teens hounded to an early grave by self-righteous bigots. Rather, he
laid the blame for the suicides at the feet of gay rights organizations:

"Some homosexuals may recognize intuitively that their same-sex
attractions are abnormal--yet they have been told by the homosexual
movement, and their allies in the media and the educational
establishment, that they are "born gay" and can never change. This--and
not society's disapproval--may create a sense of despair that can lead
to suicide."[4]

In 2010, legislators in Uganda, spurred by far-right activists from the
U.S., crafted a now-infamous bill that would have imposed the death
penalty on homosexuals. If that wasn't extreme enough, it also provided that one can be sent to
prison for up to 3 years merely for failing to report a homosexual act
within 24 hours and any repeat of that crime of failure to report also subjects one to the death penalty. But when it comes to homosexuals, it seems nothing is too extreme for FRC chief Perkins, who, in June 2010, championed this bill
on his weekly radio alert, grossly misrepresenting it in order to sell it.
President Obama had just publicly condemned the bill, remarks Perkins
characterized as demonstrating "his preoccupation with defending
homosexuality." He continued:

"The President criticized Ugandan leaders for considering enhanced
penalties for crimes related to homosexuality. The press has widely
mischaracterized the law which calls for the death penalty, not for
homosexual behavior which is already a crime, but for acts such as
intentionally spreading HIV/AIDS, or preying upon vulnerable individuals
such as children, which has been a problem in Uganda for years because
the large number of orphans. The President said that 'We may disagree about gay marriage, but
surely we can agree that it is unconscionable to target gays and
lesbians for who they are.' Mr. President as long as you characterize
efforts to uphold moral conduct that protects others and in particular
the most vulnerable, as attacking people, civility will continue to
evade us."

The notion that the bill only offers "enhanced penalties" for
"intentionally spreading HIV/AIDS" or for pedophiles is a lie offered by
its stateside defenders such as Accuracy In Media (a pro-fascist organization). When the U.S. Congress took up consideration of a resolution condemning the proposed Ugandan legislation, the FRC spent $25,000 lobbying congress
to, in its words, "remove sweeping and inaccurate assertions that
homosexual conduct is internationally recognized as a fundamental human
right."

That's the Family Research Council. For every item I've mentioned here,
there are hundreds of others of the same character--the story has always
been the same.[5] The org has spent decades purveying demonstrably
false propaganda portraying homosexuals as subhuman degenerates,
predatory pedophiles out to get your children, anti-family,
anti-religious, disease-ridden junkie militants who live short,
depressed lives, mentally deranged people who can be "cured," who, as
homosexuals, have no place in society. People who should be made
illegal, both at home and abroad, perhaps even killed. This is why the Southern Poverty Law
Center has correctly labeled the FRC a "hate group".

This, on the other hand, is the characterization of the org offered by
Kathleen Gilbert, writing over at the conservative LifeSiteNews today:

"The people at Family Research Council hate no one, and are the kindest people you will ever meet."

Her article
is, I suspect, going to be typical of the right-wing response to
today's shooting. A narrative will emerge that those at FRC don't hate
anyone. They're just all about good, wholesome Christian values and
their problem is that they've been victimized by those mean ol' queers
and those mean ol' liberals who hate on them so much for no good reason
and whose hatred finally drove one of their own to want to shoot up the
good, inoffensive people of the FRC. The far right will try to use this
narrative against the FRC's critics, as, indeed, that's the only reason
it's being crafted in the first place. The worst of them will barely be
able to contain their glee at this rarest of birds, a left-wing
terrorist incident inside the U.S. There will be no self-evaluation, no
suggestion that the FRC's own activities may have provoked the incident, no consideration that perhaps this sort of hate propaganda needs to be dialed back
and there will be no pause--those activities will continue unabated.

As I write these words, it's already going on. While 27 LGBT orgs immediately condemned
today's violence, the far right has rushed to play the victim, craft
their narrative of persecution, and wallow in it, while demanding the
FRC's critics shut up and go away.

I have a better idea. And you've just read it.

--j.

---

[1] Tony Perkins has a checkered history. As manager of Republican Woody
Jenkins unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign in 1996, he ponied up nearly
$100,000 to get access to the mailing list of former KKK leader David
Duke, later filing false disclosure forms to conceal the source of the
list. In 2001, he gave a speech to the Council of Conservative Citizens,
a virulently racist group that, as the White Citizens Councils, had
fought racial integration in the '60s.

[2] Following FRC tradition, Peter Sprigg, currently "Senior Fellow For Policy Studies" at the FRC, hasquite ahistory
of distorting and misrepresenting legitimate research to serve anti-gay
ends. At FRC, honesty and accuracy consistently take a back seat to
bigotry.

[3] "I would much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States
than to import them into the United States, because we believe
homosexuality is destructive to society."

[4] Sprigg has pimped this same line:
"The most effective way of reducing teen suicide attempts is not to
create a 'positive social environment' for the affirmation of
homosexuality. Instead, it would be to discourage teens from
self-identifying as gay, lesbian, or bisexual."

[5] And the FRC's targets are much more numerous than just homosexuals. Jerry Boykin, the FRC's current vice president, has said Islam is "a totalitarian way of life" that "should not be protected under the First Amendment," and has suggested Barack Obama may be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.